Thursday, November 17, 2011

Still on CS4 or older? Adobe announces upgrade policy for CS6.

In a recent blog post Adobe announced pricing for Creative Cloud, which, among other things will offer subscription pricing for Creative Suite products.

But also in this blog post is the folowing nugget:

"With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions). If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6."

So, if you don't think you'll be enrolling in Creative Cloud, but prefer a perpetual license, it might be smart to upgrade to CS5.5 while you can.

1 comment:

This move may make sense for Adobe apps that someone heavily uses, but it may backfire on Adobe for apps that only get occasional use.

I'm an example. With the exception of ID 5.0, which offered little of value to a writer/editor/publisher like me, I've been upgrading ID just after very release since CS 2.0. I use it enough that staying with upgrades make sense.

But I don't use Photoshop that much, so I've only been upgrading it after several new releases, and then only just in time to keep my upgrade option open. Even then, the upgrades are a close call.

With only a 20% discount, I seriously doubt I'll stay on the Photoshop upgrade treadmill. For my limited purposes, the differences between CS 3 and CS 6 barely justifies the traditional $200 upgrade. That's why I haven't bought CS 4 or CS5. There's no way it'd justify $700 x 0.8 or $560.

For a secondary app, like quite a few others, I simply don't need the fancy new stuff. Paying 80% of retail for a feature set that from my perspective only adds about 5% more value makes no sense. If there's some special new feature I absolutely must use for a particular project, I can take the file over to a friend who owns Photoshop. Saving $560 is worth driving a couple of miles.

Personally, I think Adobe should adopt a system that's a bit more complex but fairer. Each version back would slice a bit off the discount. At the same time, each Adobe app you upgrade would give you a discount on others.

That'd encourage users to have multiple apps and to upgrade them with the regularity THEY feel is best. There wouldn't be any 'falling off a cliff' scheme where dropping back one version from the latest almost triples ($200 to $560) the upgrade cost. That's not a policy you can get away with in this depressed economy, particularly with Adobe's more mature and already feature-rich products.